--but perhaps there may be some way in which I can repair the
damage I have done."

She looked at him levelly, curiously.

"You are a seaman, are you not?"

"I'm Tunis Latham. I own the schooner _Seamew_, and command her. We
are going to run back and forth from Boston to the Cape--Cape Cod."

"Oh! I could scarcely fill a position on your schooner, Captain
Latham."

She smiled again. It was a weary smile, however, not like the former
flash of amusement she had shown. Her head drooped as her mind sank
into unhappy retrospection. Tunis looked aside at her with a great
hunger in his heart to take all her trouble--no matter what it
was--upon his own mind and give her the freedom she needed. What or
who the girl was did not matter. Even what she had done, or what
she had not done meant little to Tunis Latham.

She was the one girl in all this world who had ever interested him
beyond a passing moment, and he was convinced that she alone would
ever interest him. The cheap environment of their meeting meant
nothing. If she was free, her own mistress, and he could get her, he
meant to make this girl his wife.

"You didn't tell me your name," he said directly. "Won't you? I have
been frank with you."

"Why, so you have," said the girl. There might have been a strata of
laughter underlying the words; yet her face was sober enough. "If
you really wish to know, Captain Latham, my name is Macklin."

"_Miss_ Macklin?" he asked, a positive tremor in his voice.

"Certainly. Sheila Macklin, spinster."

Tunis drew a long breath. That was enough! He would take his chance
in the game with any other man as long as she was not promised. But
there was no use in spoiling everything by being too precipitate.
The captain of the _Seamew_ might be simple, but he was not the man
to ruin a thing through impulsiveness. That exhibition in the
restaurant was hooked up with wrath.

There had been an undercurrent of thought in his mind ever since he
had met this girl for the second time, and it was quite a natural
thought, comparing her with Ida May Bostwick. If Sheila Macklin had
only been Ida May, after all! It was a ridiculous idea. Not a
feature or betrayed trait of character was like any that the
disappointing great-niece of Prudence Ball possessed. This girl
sitting beside Tunis on the bench and Ida May Bostwick were as
little alike as though they were inhabitants of two different
worlds.

He had begun to imagine, too, how well this